the full moon in leo for writers
Hi everyone,
A quick housekeeping note before we jump in. Registration for my course Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work For You closes in just four days on January 31st! If you’ve been on the fence, now is the time to make that leap! Use the code “solstice” for $100 off (an FYI - some folks let me know that they were having trouble with the code, and it’s all fixed now!).
Happy Full Moon in Leo!
Jeanna
It’s Aquarius season, a time when we draw back intellectually and consider the systems that do and do not work for society at large. But this afternoon, there is a Full Moon in Leo. When the opposite signs of Leo and Aquarius are having a conversation, we are caught up in an archetypal debate between the self and the other, the individual and the collective. The self-centered performer and the selfless humanitarian, according to meme accounts.
On social media, conversations around prioritizing the “self” bring to mind exhortations to self-care or retreat, of unplugging or checking out of the big picture altogether… just so that you can rest up enough to plug back in a few days later. Is this the Leo energy we should be aspiring to?
What “self,” exactly, is being assumed? And in which context?
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The late Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and too many other (often overdue) honors to name, was an Aquarius. Someone who could see the system underneath things; her long-time editor at Knopf has said openly that he had little to do with the outcome of her books due to what he called her “brilliant structural mind.” A Black woman who brought her own books as well as others’ into form over the long haul through her work as an editor at Random House, she both understood and was aiming for specific cultural and societal impact in her work.
Morrison’s legacy is a study of the individual vis a vis the system: of how the intense specificity of personal experience can, in fact, unearth collective truths. The Leo-Aquarius axis, as it were.
In her 2019 documentary The Pieces I Am, Morrison says, “I didn’t want to speak for Black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among — it’s us. So, first thing I had to do was to eliminate the white gaze.” Eliminate the omnipresent whiteness who functioned as critic, buyer, editor, refuser. But also, and this was especially radical, completely re-envision — revision — the assumed reader. Morrison’s project was to entirely reshape what the experience of reading literature was altogether.
In an earlier interview, in 1990, she had already elaborated — “I wanted to read a book that had no codes, no little notes explaining things to white people.” And in her famous 1998 interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison said, “My sovereignty and my authority as a racialized person had to be struck immediately with the very first book.”
Sovereignty. Authority. Powerful words with direct meaning for both the individual and the collective. It’s easy to get lost in the ephemeral “humanitarian” language that can accompany Aquarius energy, but Morrison knew how to use language in a way that spoke freedom and respect and sovereignty into people’s individual lives that consequently imbued it into communities and, further, into the greater collective — like ripples, gradually growing outward.
The sovereignty of Leo feeding and leading to the collective respect of Aquarius. Opposites that flow in infinity — and are anything but disconnected.
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Taking a note from Toni Morrison’s example, a Full Moon in Leo is, perhaps, less about focusing on the “me” amidst the community than it is about not losing the particularity of the individual. When we remember that respecting the individuals ultimately invites us to respect and even rebuild the community, whatever and wherever your community is, there is power.
What are you learning about your own sovereignty and authority, especially as a writer and creative? Which parts of yourself or identity have felt expansive over the last six months? What has felt challenging? What has grown?
This may feel particularly healing. Today, the sun is cozied up with Jupiter, a planet which, in traditional astrology, is the great healer as well as a wise teacher. Jupiter brings a good dose of medicine; in the intellectual, structured sign of Aquarius, this may come through a book or a helpful conversation. However, emphasis on what feels healing and less on pushing yourself, as the moon will have a tough corner with conflict-oriented Mars shortly after that buoyant connection with Jupiter. Easy does it. Remember to rest. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all that.
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The flip side of Leo is that it is, well, the self. Writing can be — and is often — deeply solitary. I don’t know about you, but I miss writing in coffee shops; the closest I’ve come lately are “writing accountability” Zooms with friends and our respective French Presses, scattered across the country and even the world.
But reading is not solitary. Even if you technically read a book alone, you are still reading a book read by others; you are participating in a public discourse, being invited into a collective. Reading is an act that is both profoundly individual and profoundly communal. What books will you recommend, or talk about with your friends, or teach, or hand sell at a bookstore? What books will you encourage as a part of the public consciousness? Which collective systems are these books promoting or participating in?
In her essay “The Foreigner’s Home,” Morrison addresses this pointedly —
“Beloved, Jazz, Paradise — each has a structural anomaly in common. A postnarrative, extratext, outside-the-book coda that comments not on the plot or story, but on the experience of the plot; not on the meaning of the story, but on the experience of gathering meaning from the story. These coda play an advocacy role, insisting on the consequences of having read the book, intervening in the established intimacy between reader and page, and forcing, if successful, a meditation, debate, argument that needs others for its fullest exploration. In short, social acts complete the reading experience.”
What are the consequences of having read a book? What are the consequences for the self — and which selves, amidst the many interlocking communities that make up a city, a nation? What responsibility does a writer have vis a vis the reader, or their community? What responsibility does the reader have to the ideas they are imbibing, or sharing?
These are questions I don’t have the answer to; at any rate, my answers would be informed by my own experience as a white, queer lesbian who grew up working class. There are, I would wager, innumerable answers. But here in Aquarius season, we are invited to take responsibility for thinking about them, for putting pressure on the idea of the artist as an isolated “self” who exists entirely outside of, unbeholden to, a society.
Which self? Which context?
P.S. We’re going to have another Friday Open Thread tomorrow, so keep a look out! The next newsletter goes out Saturday — the first Mercury Retrograde of the year starts then!